


Here's To The Men

by IShouldBeWriting



Category: Singularity North
Genre: Cute Dogs, Gen, Men Being Sensitive, SNAGs, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-28
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-12-09 18:30:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/776632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IShouldBeWriting/pseuds/IShouldBeWriting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the biggest thing that shape's the course of a man's life is his mother.  And sometimes, that's a good thing. An insight into TEAR's mechanic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here's To The Men

_”Here’s to the men with the vision to see_  
With equality everyone gains so  
Here’s to their courage and here’s to their truth  
And their part in the breaking of chains, oh.” 

The lads ribbed him mercilessly, but Bob never cared. He liked it that the female staff at TEAR felt comfortable around him. He’d had his fair share of amorous feminine companionship in his day and enjoyed it thoroughly but if it’d taught him anything it was that his mother had been right: if encouraged and treated respectfully, women could be just as integral a part of the services as men. In Bob’s experience, male engineering officers still had a tendency to underestimate the capabilities of the women under their command. But TEAR didn’t officially have anyone in charge of engineering and repairs. So Bob took it upon himself to handle the task, and in doing so he’d made certain that each and every one of the women who expressed an interest was given an opportunity to learn, become confident in her skills, and shine like the precious diamond she was.

Watching him tutor Freddy, Major Sayer’s pretty little medic, Tash, had given him a softly knowing smile. Bob had been worried that the sometimes prickly medic would take offense at his attitudes toward women but it seemed that even if they didn’t necessarily always see eye to eye, in this respect at least she understood Bob’s intentions.

Under Agatha’s steady encouragement, Bob had become the unofficial mentor for TEAR’s female junior officers and support staff. When Freddy decided that Diane needed help to get a batch of computer circuitry level soldering completed in time for a system rebuild, shyly she’d asked him to teach her what she needed to know to help her friend. 

In the end, it’d been the four of them, Freddy, Diane, McKenna and Bob, who’d spent a weekend myopically staring through lighted magnifiers as they worked together to complete the job. Overworked and punchy, they’d been giggling like school children when Zenia stopped by late Sunday evening. The giant black and white Great Dane that had been trailing in her wake when she arrived wandered over to place his large head in Freddy’s lap. The redheaded corporal’s face transformed as she put down her tools and spent a few moments scratching the dog behind the ears.

Shaking her head, Zenia smiled and swept the magenta streaked length of her fringe out of her eyes. “You lot are sillier than my daughter and her friends at a scout retreat!” 

Bob bit the inside of his cheek and tried to plaster a serious expression on his face once again. “Just helping my lovelies out a bit, ma’am. No reason we can’t have fun while doing so.”

“No reason at all, Mr. Thorton,” Zenia agreed evenly.

She watched as her dog meandered down the line of workstations, to investigate Bob. Typically Brutus was wary of men. It’d taken months of steady affection and careful behavior for her husband to gain the gentle dog’s trust. Zenia had her suspicions as to why the dog was so cautious, but the breeder he’d come from had been unwilling to substantiate her thoughts for fear of being brought up on animal cruelty charges.

Seeing the big dog take an interest in him, Bob carefully turned off his soldering equipment, pulled off his magnifying safety glasses, and came down off his stool. Leaning on the stool for support as he dropped down creakily to his knees, Bob waited, head tilted sideways as he watched the dog indirectly. Zenia watched him with growing interest as the mechanic silently and humbly submitted to the dog’s scrutiny. After a few moments of sniffing, the big dog unceremoniously shoved the man hard in the hip, obviously trying to get at something of interest in his pocket.

“Leave off, you big oaf!” Zenia commanded, her eyes crinkling with amusement at the corners.

“Not his fault, ma’am,” Bob demurred as he gently shoved the dog’s head aside, fished in his pocket for a moment, and pulled out a leather pouch closed with a drawstring. “Mind if I give him a treat?”

“Depends on what sort of treat it is?” Zenia responded, becoming ever more curious about the mechanic and his eccentricities.

Bob slipped a finger into the edge of the pouch and teased it open, pulling out a dark brownish strip that Zenia recognized instantly as dried jerky.

“Do you have dogs, Mr. Thorton?” She asked, unaccustomed to seeing anyone other than fellow dog owners carrying the beloved treat around on their person.

“No, ma’am. Just happen to have grown a fondness for the stuff myself.” He cocked his head in question, silently asking permission to share his snack.

“That’s… an oddity,” she opined, hoping he’d offer more of an explanation.

“Not the first time I’ve been called odd, ma’am.” Bob replied, getting one more piece of the jerky out of his pouch before he tucked it back into the pocket of his combat trousers. Diane hopped down off her stool unasked and put her shoulder grabbed his forearm to give him a hand getting up again. Zenia’s expression turned concerned but the mechanic waved her off as he settled back to lean against the stool again.

“My joints hate this weather,” he explained. “There are plenty of things about being in the service that I don’t miss, but one of the ones I do is the warm dry heat of being on duty in the dessert during Telic.”

“Ah,” Zenia nodded her understanding, “So I truly am curious; where’d you pick up the jerky habit?”

“Medieval re-enactment faires,” Bob muttered. “And when the pre-packed stuff proved to be too bloody expensive, I begged my mum to teach me to make it myself.”

Zenia blinked and looked back and forth between Freddy and Diane for confirmation. The man was proving to be full of surprises, making Zenia annoyed at herself for having stereotyped and dismissed him when he first joined TEAR.

_”Boys are brought up from the time they are small to believe that they’ve got to be tough_  
And they’re taught not to cry and they’re trained not to feel for they’re told that its womanish stuff.  
And they’re taught on the TV that women exist for the pleasure and service of men.  
And they see in their schools that the men are in charge  
So they’re taught this again and again.  
So…” 

Bob’s father had died when he was in his early teens and Bob had ended up being the “man of the house”, trying to keep his four younger sisters in line while his mother worked long hours to support them all. His mum was a school secretary during the day and did bookkeeping on the weekends and at night while Bob and his sisters did their homework. They’d never had a lot, but his mum had made certain that none of them ever went hungry nor had to go to school in threadbare clothing. Sure, there were times when Bob envied his more well-off classmates, but then, some of those classmates got beaten when they didn’t excel at their lessons. His mother never raised a hand to him or his sisters, no matter how infuriating their behaviour. Bob always knew that he was loved which was far more than some of his classmates could have claimed.

As he’d grown older, Bob realized that there was something else aside from the lack of amenities that set him apart. Trite as it sounded, in Bob’s case dissection labs had been the thing that finally separated him from all of the other lads. While his chums were eagerly waving frog intestines at each other, Bob had still been struggling to convince himself to cut his frog open. He knew that the creature was dead, but he still couldn’t bring himself to do it. The lads ragged him mercilessly for it. And his teacher had asked to see Bob and his mum after school. 

Bob had never been so proud of his mum as on that day. She’d stood up to his teacher and flatly told him that her boy wasn’t going to be a surgeon so he didn’t need to know how to cut other creatures apart. Bob’s feelings mattered more to her than his marks in biology. When his end of term report included a failing grade in biology, she’d simply smiled at him and complimented how well he’d done on the rest of his courses.

_”And as they get older they learn from their friends the terrible power of names_  
And the ones they hate most are the ones they’ll be called if they don’t play the old macho games.  
So it’s only the wise who consider the cost and only the brave who can change.  
For the wise and the brave know that for the applause they’d give half of themselves in exchange.  
So…” 

Bob had been called a lot of things in his time. Zenia’s calling him an oddity was perhaps one of the mildest. And to be honest, at his age he knew that she was right; he was an oddity. An unmarried man who liked to cook, enjoyed the company of women but remained a bachelor, was gentle, and chose to encourage everyone around him to make beauty and art.

But it didn’t matter. The soul of the pacifist boy raised by a single mother was still there and always would be. He loved it that women like Diane and Freddy and Emily saw him as safe companionship. Unlike the rest of TEAR’s lads, he didn’t use every interaction he had with them as an opportunity to get into their knickers. That didn’t mean he didn’t enjoy having a willing and softly curved bedmate once in a while. But when it came to the women he worked with, Bob was all business. Unless proven otherwise, he treated his lovelies as if they were no less competent than the lads. And when the difference in the conformation of their bodies got in the way? He found tricks to teach them to even the playing field. Understanding the physics of using leverage and gravity could work just as well as muscle, and twice as easily.

Bob smiled at the athletically built female captain. In many ways, she reminded him of his own mum. A strong and shining example to her children of what a woman could become if she set her mind to it. In then end, that, more than anything else was what kept him working. He’d retired his commission. He could have comfortably lived out the rest of his life on a pensioner’s allotment. But it was women like Freddy and Captain Rivers that had drawn him back to work. 

Neither of them knew it, but seeing Diane and Jez working in their respective areas of expertise when he’d toured TEAR had been the thing that had gotten Bob to sign on. It wasn’t the money - though that was certainly not to be discounted. It’d been the glimpses he’d gotten of men and women working side by side as equals. No matter how Bob felt about Will Bennett and his confusing treatment of Major Black and Captain Graham in their personal relationship, he gave the team leader credit for always treating his female personnel as equals in every way. Sometimes it made Bob wonder idly if Will had been raised by a strong woman, just like his own mum.

_”The customs of centuries die very hard but we still live in hope for the time_  
When equality’s not just in charters and laws but entrenched within everyone’s mind.  
Still the internal struggle is the hardest of all, it’s the fight to be all we can be.  
But when women and men join as allies and friends, we’ll find truth can set all of us free.  
So…” 

“So what exactly _are_ all of you working on, Mr. Thorton?” Zenia asked curiously. She’d helped Major Sayer handle the paperwork requisitioning the parts which Diane needed, but she still wasn’t certain what exactly was being done.

“Better to ask Diane that question, ma’am,” Bob deferred, tipping his hand at the wispy blond on the seat at the end of the row.

Diane looked up at Zenia, eyes made comically large by the magnifying glasses she was wearing. She swiped a fine wisp of hair away from one cheek, leaving behind a faint smudge of grey soot. 

“We’re building a new set of black boxes for the teams. Jez had complained recently that there were problems with the signal from the boxes dropping off when the teams end up underground or behind enough concrete and metal from a building’s structure. So I got this idea to build a more powerful transceiver into each unit with a more tightly focused signal. Won’t know whether or not it works though until this batch are built and the lads take them out into the field.”

Bob smiled fondly at Diane. 

“Smart as a whip, this one is,” he offered the compliment and Diane’s answering smile showed a camaraderie that Zenia hadn’t seen the aloof signals specialist develop with anyone else yet aside from Freddy.

“How long would it have taken you to build a full set of kit for all the teams on your own?” Zenia asked.

“Depends on how much abuse my eyes and my wrists would have been willing to put up with at a go?” Diane replied, rolling her wrists at the reminder of how challenging it was to perform soldering on such fine circuitry.

“I told ya, lovey, any time something like this comes up you just come ask Bob for help. I’m always happy to pitch in.”

“Besides, Diane,” Freddy chimed in, “its going faster and its more fun with all of us doing it together. We’ll probably be done in another hour. You can have these out in the field for testing on the lads during their training exercises tomorrow.”

Zenia grimaced at the reminder. Much as she agreed with Major Black in principle, she was not looking forward to the training exercises she had planned. She wanted to make certain the lads could operate with as little technological support as possible. So she’d designed a training scenario to throw at them where Jez’s comms were going to mysteriously stop working. The lads were going to be left with nothing but Zenia, Freddy, and Jez running a paper ops table via mobile phone as their backup. Zenia expected it to be a very long and tiring day.

“Speaking of those training exercises, did you and Jez get all your paperwork done, Freddy? I expect that running the ops for the lads is going to be a full time job tomorrow.”

“Done and filed with MoD,” Freddy chirped efficiently.

Looking back at Bob once more, Zenia couldn’t help but smile. It’d taken her three years to get the shy redheaded corporal to come out of her shell. Bob appeared to have done so in a matter of months. If he could work that sort of magic with someone as cautious as Freddy, Zenia would definitely have to give him further consideration. The man was obviously something different. 

_Here’s to the men...._ Zenia thought quietly as Bob smiled back at her.


End file.
